Over the weekend on “The Score” radio show, we followed-up on the story of how Chris Horner, working with the American Tradition Institute, had filed a freedom of information request with the University of Virginia for emails and materials former UVA Prof. Michael Mann generated during his time at the school. What we learned from our interview with Horner is jaw-dropping.

When what Horner termed “a gaggle of pressure groups” got wind of people lurking around Mann’s emails, they descended on UVA stating, in effect “don’t you dare co-operate with law enforcement to release the records the taxpayer paid for in a fraud pre-investigation under a statute that passed unanimously [in the Virginia General Assembly],” that nowhere provides an exemption for academics.

Horner says that once these groups made their displeasure known, UVA “reversed course” and decided to fight, spending “$500,000 with [former U.S. Senator] John Warner’s law firm in Washington, D.C. to keep the taxpayer from seeing the records.”

Today the American Tradition Institute responded to the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and 11 other activist groups – all which are oft-political and always left-leaning – for their new pressure campaign against the University of Virginia, which aims to block ATI’s efforts on behalf of taxpayers to access University records of climate scientist Michael Mann.

In a letter the advocacy groups ask UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan to deny ATI’s Freedom of Information Act request for emails and other documents related to claims made by Dr. Mann to obtain, and claim payment under, certain taxpayer-funded grants. The groups, which also include Union of Concerned Scientists and People for the American Way, cite phantom exemptions to Virginia FOIA laws such as “academic freedom” and “the exchange of scholarly and scientific ideas.”

ACLU-VA and its collaborators note that ATI’s request “resembles the controversial civil investigative demand, or CID, issued last year by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act” for Dr. Mann’s records. As a matter of substance the requests are identical, but these same groups are the only instigators of ‘controversy.’ ATI simply seeks access to records that belong to taxpayers, under a transparency law that expressly covers state universities and their employees.

In this “Sunshine Week” — amid revelations that the vow of transparency was not, as George Stephanopoulos famously said about Bill Clinton’s truthiness, one of the campaign promises Barack Obama intended to keep — I have just filed an administrative appeal with NASA challenging its thoroughly puzzling refusal to release ethics-related records for its high-profile global warming activist/advocate, the astronomer Dr. James Hansen.

This request and appeal are on behalf of the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, for which I am pursuing a transparency project. Other efforts include seeking the same records from the University of Virginia, under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is seeking through a taxpayer protection, anti-fraud statute.

On that front, we have been promised that a rolling production of documents will begin in mere days (which does not mean that we won’t be forced to litigate over claimed exemptions).

Deep-pocketed environmentalist group is implicated in bank rolling a new initiative to silence climate skeptics using libel laws.

Beleaguered global warming religionist, Michael Mann has signed up a Canadian law firm with ties to the ultra-green David Suzuki Foundation (DSF) to help buffer him against the increasing tide of criticism for his key role in helping to corrupt climate science. Skeptics fear DSF and other warmist groups will be employing the likes of McConchie for reprisal attacks against skeptic scientists who helped derail the global warming tax raising juggernaut.

It was Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, who first exposed the former pin-up boy of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a fraudster caught cynically pocketing millions in taxpayer research grants using bogus global warming data. Professor Mann, still stubbornly defended by his employers, Penn. State University, has sought help from Vancouver attorneys, McConchie Law Foundation in a desperate counter-offensive to salvage what remains of his shattered reputation.

A federal government inspector general has revealed prima facie proof that the so-called independent inquiries widely if implausibly described as clearing the ClimateGate principals of wrongdoing were, in fact, whitewashes. This has been confirmed to Senate offices. It will not be released to the public for some time because the investigation is ongoing.

The document, an interview transcript, will put an end to the foolish talk of anything resembling a ClimateGate “inquiry” having taken place. It will also invite a real inquiry into the affair. Expect fireworks, as the one such effort, by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, is being fought hysterically by Big Science and Big Academia.

Critically, it also begs questions of Penn State University, which conducted one of the three supposed inquiries into ClimateGate.

The key point is that the Penn State investigators never interviewed a principal who was able to confirm or deny a key charge against “Hockey Stick” lead author of “Hide the Decline” infamy Michael Mann. This individual has now been interviewed, and what he told federal investigators has indicted Mann and Penn State.

Former Bush administration chief of the Council on Environmental Quality James Connaughton is now the government affairs head for an electric utility, Constellation Energy. But more than that, he is a media darling for his willingness to push the climate agenda on behalf of his company, which is hoping to profit from it — at your expense — via wealth transfers, taxes and other inefficiencies in the name of schemes that no one actually claims would detectably impact the climate.

As such, it is unreasonable to believe that the whole mess is about the climate, particularly when you toss in the rest of the admissions by Gang Green when they slip off-message. But, still, when you rob Peter (you) to pay Paul (Constellation, et al.), you can count on Paul’s enthusiastic support.

Better yet, with Mr. Connaughton the press gets to run the green cheerleading as coming from a “former Bush official.”

And so it comes to this. Today, we see ClimateWire’s story “SCIENCE: Former Bush official defends IPCC,” with the gag-inducing subhead, “Connaughton calls IPPC [sic] findings ‘fabulous.’”

Radical green activist Bill McKibben cleverly responds in today's Washington Post to Glenn Beck having called McKibben a communist. Cleverly, that is, up until about halfway through.

[The U.S. Chamber] submitted a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency arguing that it should avoid regulating carbon emissions because, in the event of global warming, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations."

To me that sounds absurd.

This would be amusing except the guy's a college professor. Who apparently has little clue about that to which he has dedicated much of his life.

This inanity can only be the result of someone spending a little too much time feverishly staring at fudged computer model projections of the future, at the expense of reality. Reality is evidence, models are not. And yet this haughty foolishness passed not only Mr. McKibben's typing fingers and mental editing process, but also the Post's system of review (whatever that may be).

The man battling NASA for access to potential "Climategate" e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

"What we've got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming," Mr. Horner said. "We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we've seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA."

He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be released.